 never abandoning them until they are
hopelessly reprobate. And the Church ought to represent the feeling of the
community, so that every parish should be a family knit together by Christian
brotherhood under a spiritual father. But the ideas of discipline and Christian
fraternity are entirely relaxed - they can hardly be said to exist in the public
mind: they hardly survive except in the partial, contradictory form they have
taken in the narrow communities of schismatics; and if I were not supported by
the firm faith that the Church must ultimately recover the full force of that
constitution which is alone fitted to human needs, I should often lose heart at
observing the want of fellowship and sense of mutual responsibility among my own
flock. At present everything seems tending towards the relaxation of ties -
towards the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation,
which has its roots in the past. Your conscience and your heart have given you
true light on this point, Miss Tulliver; and I have said all this that you may
know what my wish about you - what my advice to you - would be, if they sprang
from my own feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circumstances.«
    Dr Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of effusive
benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in the gravity of his
look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his benevolence was persevering in
proportion to its reserve, she might have been chilled and frightened. As it
was, she listened expectantly, quite sure that there would be some effective
help in his words. He went on.
    »Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from
anticipating fully the very unjust conceptions that will probably be formed
concerning your conduct - conceptions which will have a baneful effect, even in
spite of known evidence to disprove them.«
    »O, I do - I begin to see,« said Maggie, unable to repress this utterance of
her recent pain. »I know I shall be insulted: I shall be thought worse than I
am.«
    »You perhaps do not yet know,« said Dr Kenn, with a touch of more personal
pity, »that a letter is come which ought to satisfy every one who has known
anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult path of a return to the
right, at the moment when that return was most of all difficult.«
    »Oh - where is he?« said poor Maggie, with a flush and tremor that no
presence could have hindered.
    »He is gone abroad: he has written of all that passed to
